His Excellency Nursultan Nazarbayev
Astana, Kazakhstan

6 February 2008

Your Excellency,

We are writing on behalf of the World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forum, which represent 18,000 publications in 102 countries, to express our serious concern at the blocking of several websites and the selective application of regulations to censor the Internet.

According to reports, on 18 October 2007 the authorities blocked four independent websites which published links to audio files containing politically sensitive telephone conversations. The files featured senior government officials discussing how to bring Rakhat Aliev, one of your former allies who now lives in exile in Europe, back to Kazakhstan to stand trial. No warning was given to the websites to enable them to address the alleged irregularities. Access to one of the sites, kub.kz, remains blocked.

Kub.kz is hosted outside Kazakhstan. It was suspended by the official website regulator, the Kazakhstan Network Information Center (KazNIC), under the “Regulation for the Allocation of Domain Space in the Kazakhstan Segment of the Internet”, which prohibits sites with the .kz domain from being hosted abroad. However, the KazNIC website itself (http://nic.kz) is hosted in the USA, suggesting the selective targeting of specific websites.

We respectfully remind you that the Internet is an extremely important medium of communication and expression. Under international human rights law, any restrictions on access to the Internet must be very carefully scrutinised: any such measures should be provided by law, pursue a legitimate aim and be necessary - not simply “useful” or “appropriate” - in a democratic society.

We respectfully remind you that the blocking of access to kub.kz and other independent websites does not fulfil this test and is a clear breach of the right to freedom of expression, which is guaranteed by the Kazakh constitution and numerous international conventions, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 19 of the Declaration states: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media, regardless of frontiers."

We respectfully call on you to take all necessary steps to ensure that access to kub.kz is immediately re-opened and that websites are allowed to operate free from state interference. We urge you to do everything possible to ensure that in future your country fully respects international standards of freedom of expression.

We look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience.

Yours sincerely,

Gavin O’Reilly
President
World Association of Newspapers

George Brock
President
World Editors Forum

WAN is the global organization for the newspaper industry, with formal representative status at the United Nations, UNESCO and the Council of Europe. The organization groups 18,000 newspapers in 102 countries, 12 news agencies and 11 regional and world-wide press groups. WAN is non-governmental and non-profit.